I Will Die, But I Will Not Let You In!

A NEW REPORT WE WISH WE WOULD SEE!

(Vatican City. February 13, 2022) Two newly established Vatican commissions – one acting in conjunction with the Anglican Church of Australia - are sending icons and memorial medals to select members of the Congress of the United States as an expression of “prayerful hope” that recipients in the House of Representatives and Senate will “emulate the moral courage of these defenders of truth.”

“We recognize how challenging it is for some politicians to tell the truth and declare the January 6 assault on the American Capitol an act of terrorism,” wrote Cardinal Buonenotizie Verita of the recently established Vatican Congregation for the Development of Moral Courage. The cardinal’s letter was accompanied by a medallion of Pakistani youth Akas Bashir, recently named a “Servant of God” and candidate for sainthood.

In a startling expression of solidarity and ecumenism, the Anglican Church of Australia and the new Vatican Commission for Speaking Truth to the Tremulous sent individual icons commemorating the World War II era New Guinea Martyrs and Blessed Peter To Rot to members of Congress, noting “The courage of these almost four-hundred men and women – clergy and laity – serves as an example of humility and putting truth and the good of all before self-interest and the fear of losing power and prestige. These men and women, who gave up everything in the name of Truth, and the fruits of their lives of selfless labor changed the course of the War in the Pacific and of History. We pray you will find personal courage through their example.” 

Christians represent less than two-percent of Pakistan’s overwhelmingly Muslim population and, concentrated in the Yohanabad neighborhood, are approximately five percent of the ten million residents of the city of Lahore.

All Saints Church of the (Presbyterian) Church of Pakistan, designed like a mosque with minarets and a dome as a symbol of unity, opened on St. John’s Day, December 27, 1883. Almost one-hundred-and-thirty years later, on September 23, 2013, as six-hundred parishioners were picnicking on the church grounds following Sunday services, two suicide bombers detonated their explosive packs, killing 127 and injuring more than 250. It was the deadliest attack on a Christian community in Pakistan’s history. Other attacks on Christian churches and communities include a December 2017 suicide and gun attack on a Methodist church in Queta that claimed the lives of nine people and wounded several others.

On March 15, 2015, two terrorists from the Taliban splinter group Jamaat-ul-Ahrar simultaneously attacked St. John’s Catholic Church and the Anglican Christ Church, killing seventeen people and injuring another eighty.

In riots that followed the bomb blasts, a mob of Christians pulled two Muslim men - a local glasscutter and a hosiery worker who, apparently, had nothing to do with the church attacks - from police custody, lynched them and set their bodies afire. As a result, forty-two Christians were arrested and charged with murder. In late January 2020, the Pakistani Anti-Terrorism Court acquitted all, including two who had died in prison, after recording the statements of the victims’ families, who told the court that they had arrived at an agreement with the suspects and would have no objections to their acquittals. 

The gory lynching of Muhammad Naeem and Babar Nauman and the burning of their bodies overshadowed the heroism Akas Bashir.

In 2014, Pakistan’s Supreme Court ordered the creation of a special police force to protect minority places of worship. The order was subsequently scrapped and Punjab Human Rights and Minority Affairs Minister Kahlil Tahir Sandhu declared “there was no need for raising another force for this purpose” because the protection of churches “was quite satisfactory in the Punjab and reasonable security was being provided.” Despite the fact that the local police had been asked to provide a walk-through gate to St. John’s Church for security purposes, no security was in place on March 15, 2015.

Instead, twenty-year-old Akas Bashir, a student at the (Saint) Don Bosco Technical Institute in Lahore and active in the St. John’s parish community, was on voluntary security duty at the church entrance when he spotted a man who wanted to enter the church with an explosive belt on his body. “Akash blocked him at the entrance gate, foiling the terrorist’s plan to massacre those inside the church,” reported Fides News Agency.

“I will die, but I will not let you in,” Akash told the terrorist, who exploded his device, killing himself and the young man who is now the first Pakistani honored as a “Servant of God” – the first step toward canonization. 

Witnesses of the attack told Reuters news agency that the death toll would have been higher if not for Akash’s courage.  “I was sitting at a shop near the church when a blast jolted the area. I rushed towards the spot and saw the security guard scuffle with a man who was trying to enter the church, after failing, he blew himself up,” said witness Amir Masih.

The explosions at St. John’s and Christ’s Church - about five-hundred meters apart in the city’s Youhanabad district - occurred minutes apart, killed seventeen people and wounded at least seventy. 

“It was the faith of this young man that led him to martyrdom,” Bishop Samson Shukardin, OFM, president of the Pakistan bishops Episcopal Commission for Youth, told Fides

Papua New Guinea, with many isolated tribes and cultures and at least five-hundred languages, occupies the eastern half of New Guinea, one of the world’s largest islands. Papua New Guinea and surrounding islands were the site of some of the fiercest battles of the World War II and gave the world an impossible-to-accurately-count number of Anglican, Methodist, Lutheran, Salvation Army, Evangelical Church of Manus, and Roman Catholic martyrs between 1942 and 1945.

With the Japanese invasion of the island, Anglican Bishop Philip Strong reminded his clergy, “We must endeavour to carry on our work. God expects this of us. The church at home, which sent us out, will surely expect it of us. The universal church expects it of us. The people whom we serve expect it of us. We could never hold up our faces again if, for our own safety, we all forsook Him and fled, when the shadows of the Passion began to gather around Him in His spiritual and mystical body, the Church in Papua." They stayed. Almost immediately there were arrests. Eight Anglican clergymen and two laymen were executed "as an example" on September 2, 1942. In the next few years, many Papuan Christians of all Churches risked their own lives to care for wounded Australian, British and American soldiers.

In a 1993 article in The Melanesian Journal of Theology, Father Theo Aerts observed, “We would, without hesitation, proposed that there were at least 333 people, whose names have been recorded” as martyrs during the period of Japanese occupation of Papau New Guinea. “[T]here is solid evidence to put the total still higher. Naturally they were not only Melanesians, although among them, there were at least 84 persons who would nowadays qualify as PNG citizens.” In the end, however, “We must leave it to the Lord to remember all the Papua New Guineans whose names are known to Him alone.”

The “Fuzzy Wuzzy Angels” were Papua New Guinea “war carriers,” recruited by Australian soldiers to bring supplies to the front in the war against Japan and carry injured Australian troops to safety. Of the 6,000 carriers, seventy-five percent were from areas where the London Mission Society had worked for more than seventy years. In what may be one of History’s most amazing sidenotes, Aerts cites London Mission Society, Congregationalist minister and President of the Australian Council of Churches (1941-1946) Charles Bernard Cockett:

“Had the natives given help to the Japanese, New Guinea would have fallen. Then Australia would have been invaded . . . and if Australia and New Zealand had fallen, the Pacific would have been open to enemy aggression, right to the western coast of the United States and Canada.

Among the martyrs of Papau New Guinea highlighted by Aerts was Peter To Rot, beatified by Pope John Paul II in 1995. 

With the Japanese invasion of PNG in March 1942 and the subsequent internment of foreign missioners and outright banning of religious activities, the catechist Peter To Rot accepted the leadership of his “bush church,” providing food and shelter to the needy, offering religious instruction, and secretly administering communion to imprisoned priests. "The Japanese cannot stop us loving God and obeying his laws! We must be strong and we must refuse to give in to them," he declared and continued to gather his people in prayer. 

Peter knew that in doing so he was irrevocably marking his fate, but with great serenity he told everyone “It is beautiful to die for the faith” and challenged the immorality and polygamy of one of the indigenous “chiefs.” 

As a result, the chief betrayed To Rot to the Japanese. Imprisoned and repeatedly tortured, Peter refused to forsake his commitments as a catechist, despite the pleadings of his wife and children, who recognized that, unless he abandoned this work, he would be killed. On the day of his death, he told his mother: “The police told me that, this evening, a Japanese doctor will come to give me some medicine. Surprising since I’m not sick. I suppose this is a trick.” Saying “I must glorify the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, and thus help my people,” he asked his wife to bring his catechist’s cross and good clothes so he could go to God dressed in proper attire.

That same evening, he was beaten, forced to drink poison, suffocated and, finally, administered a lethal injection. From the day of his chief’s funeral – held in silence because the people feared the Japanese, he was considered a martyr for the Faith.

One can only hope – and pray – that, one day soon, cowering American politicians will find the courage of the Servant of God Akas Bashir and declare to those who proclaim the lie of stolen elections and attempt to terrorize the Nation with the flags of a charlatan twice defeated in the popular vote, “I will die, but I will not let you in.”

We can hope and pray – we must hope and pray, that those who purport to be public servants and representatives off the People will find the courage of Peter To Rot and declare to vaccine/pandemic deniers and political hucksters, “They cannot stop us loving God and obeying his laws! We must be strong and we must refuse to give in to them!”

And maybe, just maybe we might send them the pictures of these two men of monumental, saintly Faith and hope that Blessed Peter and Servant of God Akas will ignite the fire of courage in the dark world of so much American political cowardice.